Proteins are the nanoscale machinery of all the known cellular life. Amazingly, these large biomolecules with up to 100,000 atoms fold into unique three-dimensional shapes in which they function. These functions include all cellular chemistry (metabolism), energy conversion (photosynthesis) and transport (oxygen transport), signal processing in the brain (neurons), immune response and many others, often with an efficiency unmatched by any man-made process. Protein malfunction is often related to diseases and thousands disease-related proteins have been identified to date, many with still unknown structure. To understand, control or even design proteins we need to study protein structure, which is experimentally much harder to obtain than the information about the chemical composition (sequence) of a specific protein.

By joining this project you will contribute to a computational approach to

predict the biologically active structure of proteins

understand the signal-processing mechanisms when the proteins interact with one another

understand diseases related to protein malfunction or aggregation

develop new drugs on the basis of the three-dimensions structure of biologically important proteins.

[email protected] implements a novel approach to understand these aspects of protein structure, which lends itself very well to worldwide distributed computing. The scientific approach behind [email protected] is a computational realization of the thermodynamic hypothesis that won C. B. Anfinsen the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972.

So please help us, by joining [email protected], solve the scientific mysteries described above and decipher the biological information encoded in proteins of unknown structure.